


Here Be Dragons

by Fistful_of_Gamma_Rays



Series: Wandering Stars [5]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Aromantic Asexual Keith (Voltron), Aromantic Asexual Pidge | Katie Holt, Gen, Keith & Pidge | Katie Holt Friendship, Post-Season/Series 07
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 16:54:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24080137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fistful_of_Gamma_Rays/pseuds/Fistful_of_Gamma_Rays
Summary: Matt unwittingly kicks an emotional landmine.Pidge and Keith conspire.
Relationships: Keith & Pidge | Katie Holt
Series: Wandering Stars [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1681486
Comments: 29
Kudos: 171





	Here Be Dragons

Matt’s smuggled in some kind of fruity liquor from his rebel buddies. Coran’s assured them that it’s safe for human, altean, and galra consumption, so they all squash themselves into Shiro’s quarters with the bottle and a set of plastic cups stolen from the cafeteria water cooler. Shiro does his best to enforce moderation, at least to the extent of only filling Pidge’s cup halfway, but it’s been less than two months since they repelled Sendak’s forces and they’re still riding a wave of relief. At this point everyone in the room has sampled nunvil at least once and they’re all pretty well past caring about state liquor laws, so they’re making a sizable dent in the bottle. 

Keith doesn’t really care for it - it’s too sweet in a way that clings to the back of his teeth and the ethanol burn kind of sneaks up around it. The others seem to like it though, so he nurses his glass along and takes a sip in solidarity every once in a while. Being in the group again is nice in a way he’s still getting used to. 

Lance is almost through his cup and clearly starting to hit his stride. “- and man, that is one thing I did not expect. Who knew space was so full of attractive people? I thought aliens would be, you know, all tentacles and exoskeletons -” Keith watches Allura blink rapidly, eyebrows rising toward her hairline “- but some places we went, I was not missing _anything_ by not being on Earth.”

“A man of cosmopolitan taste, huh?” says Matt, with an exaggerated eyebrow wiggle. Shiro elbows him in the ribs.

“More than I wanted to know, Lance,” intones Pidge.

“I barely said anything! All I said is that sometimes aliens are hot!”

Pidge rolls her eyes so hard it’s almost audible. Keith sympathizes.

Matt (also at the end of his cup) sighs dramatically. “Katie. Katie, the man is right. Sometimes… the aliens are hot. And I want you to know that, when you too develop an unspeakable crush on someone with gillflaps whose name you physically can’t pronounce, I will one-hundred percent support you.”

Lance makes an indecipherable cackling noise. Pidge groans. “Oh my god, Matt.”

“It doesn’t have to be gillflaps! I’m open-minded!”

“Not gonna happen.”

“You say that now, but I’m just saying, there’s a whole universe of opportunity out there.”

“Really, Matt?” says Shiro, sounding like the most tired man in the world. 

Matt throws up his hands. “Just saying!”

Hunk does them all a favor and throws himself into the breach with a question about the liquor and the conversation pivots to other things. A little later, though, when he looks up, Pidge is missing. When she doesn’t come back, Keith puts his cup down and slips out the door.

* * *

He finds her in the rec room at the end of the hall. It’s abandoned at this hour, and she’s got her toolbox and computer with her, taking something apart on the coffee table. He watches for a minute, trying to figure out what it is, before clearing his throat. Pidge jumps.

“Holy crap, Keith. Don’t do that.”

“Sorry.” And then, because he doesn’t know how to be subtle about this kind of thing, “You okay? You left kind of suddenly.”

She squints at him and points with the screwdriver. “ _You_ don’t get to say that to me.”

He shrugs, and after a moment, comes around to the other side of the table to look at what she’s doing. He can see now that it’s one of the cleaning droids, casing disassembled, with a little motor and a tiny, hard plaque that he’s pretty sure is the control module. Pidge is prying at it gently with a screwdriver, trying to lift a corner of it off its pad without disturbing its surroundings. Keith reaches out and holds the chassis steady for her. She grunts and levers it off its pedestal. 

“I just wish he’d lay off.” She says after a moment. “Matt, I mean. I know he means well, but every once in a while he just gets like that.”

Her hand scrabbles blindly on the table under the robot. Keith hums under his breath and nudges the tool case into it. Pidge scowls and unlatches it with unnecessary savagery.

“We were out in space! I thought it would be a non-issue! Who would we ogle out in space?” She extracts a little breakout from the case. “But I guess life finds a way.” 

The breakout slots into a tiny opening on the side of the plaque, and she plugs an ungainly monster of a cable into it. The other end is, improbably, a USB plug. Keith lifts it questioningly, and she snatches it out of his hand and jams it into her computer. There is some clicking, and a window of text opens. Pidge sighs and stretches.

“I just wish he’d stop hassling me about it,” she mumbles. “I don’t want to get with anybody. I don’t want to get into anybody’s pants. I don’t want to kiss and hold hands and go on dates or whatever. I’m not interested. I’m not going to be interested.”

Keith blinks. Oh.

_Oh._

“Oh,” he mumbles. “Uh. Yeah. Me neither.” He can feel the tips of his ears turning red and has to look down at the robot. Maybe he’s had more of Matt’s awful fruit liquor than he’d thought.

The sound of Pidge’s typing has stopped, and he can feel her eyes on him. “Oh,” she says, very quietly. “Really?”

He shrugs. “Yeah.” The screwdriver’s right there. He picks it up and starts spinning it through his fingers, lets the thump of the rubberized haft across his knuckles blur out a little of the discomfort. Pidge starts typing again, slower than before.

After a moment, she speaks again, her voice quiet. “Do you… Did it take you a long time to realize it wasn’t just fake?”

He snorts and feels his shoulders relax a little. “Forever. Didn’t really sink in until Shiro started getting serious with Adam. He was so loopy all the time and I just didn’t get it.”

She produces a stifled laugh. “Can’t picture Shiro as loopy.”

“He was insufferable.”

She barks out a real laugh this time, and he feels the corner of his mouth kick up. “For the longest time I thought it was just poetic license,” she says. “I didn’t realize it was, like, an actionable feeling that real people had.” She pauses. “And then Matt made an absolute fool of himself, in public, with a guitar, for some girl he barely knew, and I figured there must be something to it.”

Keith huffs out a laugh, and watches as she picks her way through the file, stopping occasionally to edit a line. Her mouth thins and she squints at the screen.

“He keeps trying to tell me I can’t prove a negative. That there’s got to be someone out there I’m into.”

He grimaces. “I don’t think it works like that.” He pauses and considers. “Or I don’t know. Maybe it does for some people. But I don’t think everybody’s just got a. Uh. A type out there waiting for them.”

The typing continues, slower now. “I hope not.” Pidge scrunches herself a little closer to her keyboard, her face almost invisible under her hair. “I guess that sounds kind of bad. It just seems so… messy.”

“Yeah.” He hesitates a long moment, and spins the screwdriver into his other hand. “When I first started to suspect the whole galra thing, I was kind of worried that I was going to wind up being into them like that.”

Pidge’s typing stops. “Oh. Yeah. Wow, that’s a whole ‘nother layer to that, huh?”

He shrugs. “Didn’t happen. Still not interested.” He eyes the tense set of her shoulders. “Matt’s full of shit.”

Pidge snorts and uncurls a little from her hunch.

There’s the rapid one-two click of a keyboard shortcut and a progress bar comes up. It fills up and chimes, and she disconnects the cable. Together, they reassemble the robot. When it’s done, Pidge sets it down on the ground and they watch it zoom off into the hallway.

Keith’s no idiot. “What’s it going to do to Matt?”

Pidge is no idiot either, so she doesn’t bother pretending to be offended. “Its job is picking up the trash and bringing it to the disposal now. Except that the trash is all of Matt’s shoes and the disposal is that creepy crawlspace near the laundry.”

“That’s low.” He nods approvingly. 

“Thanks.” There’s a little silence, and then she skates a sideways glance at him. “I missed doing this with you.”

He cocks an eyebrow skeptically. “Disassembling robots? You do that all the time with Hunk.”

“That’s different. Hunk’s too nice a guy to talk shit about Matt.”

He snorts. “But I’m mean enough for you?”

“Yes,” she replies unhesitatingly, and then pauses. “And I don’t think Hunk would have gotten what the problem was. At least not at first,” she says more quietly. “So thanks.”

Gingerly, he pats her shoulder. “Gotta stick together, right?”

Pidge rolls her eyes and delivers a brief but bracing side-hug. “Yeah.”

They don’t talk much more after that, but the silence while they clean up the tools is comfortable. When they get back to Shiro’s quarters, Keith holds the door open while Pidge kicks Matt’s shoes into the hall for the robot to find and walks away feeling fine.

**Author's Note:**

> There are a few stories out there with this basic premise that this story owes a debt to, but I'm hoping people won't object to another.


End file.
